iPhone Duo reviews are out today, and while I was hoping that this year I’d get to review this hybrid device under embargo, it hasn’t happened (I hope it will, someday!). I’ve spent the past few hours reading, annotating, and watching as many Duo reviews as I could, and I’ve compiled the most interesting bits and common themes in the roundup below.

The broad strokes are consistent across all the reviews: the Duo’s hinge and the matte inner display are terrific; the lack of Face ID and a telephoto camera are serious trade-offs; and most third-party apps aren’t ready yet. But there’s plenty of nuance in the details, and even some disagreement (about the speakers, of all things).

Let’s dive in.

Design and the Hinge

There’s near-unanimous praise for the Duo’s hinge. As Jaron Schneider wrote at PetaPixel:

This is an intricate, complicated design and the result is an opening and closing experience that is remarkably satisfying. The resistance you feel changes with the angle, and the hinge features a custom alloy that is nitride-treated to preserve it over time. Basically, the Duo’s excellent opening and closing experience is meant to last.

Brian Tong called it “the best hinge on a foldable that I’ve experienced because it flows, it feels smooth.” Joanna Stern, meanwhile, had a machine fold her Duo over 32,000 times while she slept:

The result, the hinge was actually a little bit stiffer. But in everyday use, I really couldn’t feel a difference. So, after 32,000 folds, it felt pretty much the same as day one, which is pretty darn impressive.

As for durability, Raymond Wong at Gizmodo ran an unplanned test of his own:

I had an unfortunate mishap where the unfolded iPhone Duo slipped out of my hands and fell down a few steps that also happened to be wet from rain. While not an intentional test for durability or the device’s IP68 water and dust resistance rating, the fact that the iPhone Duo survived with no major damage (only a few minor scuffs to the metal frame) and both screens had no scratches or cracks really shows how tough it is.

Opinions on the weight are more mixed. Chance Miller at 9to5Mac found the Duo easier to hold than its weight would suggest, though not easier to open:

But one key difference is weight distribution. Despite being slightly heavier, I find the iPhone Duo significantly more comfortable to hold than the iPhone 18 Pro Max.

Unfolding the iPhone Duo is very much a two-handed operation. The hinge has enough resistance, and the two halves fit together securely enough that you really need both hands to open it comfortably.

Marques Brownlee was more direct: “after you use this thing for like a week or two, you would be happy if it was 20% lighter.”

The Nano-Texture Display and the Crease

For most reviewers, the matte inner display is the star of the show. Michael Fisher said that “the inner screen is a masterpiece” and that “this paper-like nano-texture is a revelation that also camouflages the crease beautifully.” Marques agreed:

Now, the inside screen is the part of the Duo that does not feel first generation at all. They did an incredible job with it. I love it.

Max Weinbach explained what’s going on under the hood:

On iPhone Duo, the nano-texture coating is etched into the polymer cover using maskless laser lithography that essentially writes a micro-lens over each pixel individually. Yes, each pixel.

As for the crease, I think Chance put it best:

Here’s the best way I can think of explaining it: anyone who says the iPhone Duo’s crease is invisible is misleading you. Even Apple doesn’t say that. It talks about the work it’s done to reduce the crease’s visibility, but nowhere does it claim the crease is invisible. At the same time, anyone who says the iPhone Duo’s crease is visible enough to be a problem is similarly misleading you.

Nilay Patel and Allison Johnson at The Verge pointed out that you can still feel it:

The matte display is indeed there to help hide the crease, which Apple keeps calling “perceptually flat” because it’s more fun to invent science-y marketing phrases than just saying “you mostly don’t see it.” But it’s true: You mostly can’t see the display crease, although you can definitely feel it.

Jaron, for one, is into it:

Another point that I’ve seen talked about is how it will feel to run your thumbs or fingers across that hinge as you’re using the Duo. “You’ll feel it,” I’ve seen said. Yeah, you do. And you know what? I like it.

When I’m scrolling Reddit, I kind of get excited for the moment that I’ll drag my thumb down across that hinge. The only way I can describe it is as a subtle, soothing bump. It feels nice!

Not everyone is sold on matte, though. Mark Spoonauer at Tom’s Guide missed the punchiness of a glossy OLED:

But while the iPhone Duo’s main display gets plenty bright, it doesn’t offer the perfect blacks or vibrant hues I normally associate with OLED.

And Joanna had a more practical complaint:

But what bothered me more were the fingerprints that seep into the screen and that were much harder to clean off than on a glossy screen. Apple, you could have included the $9 polishing cloth with the $2,000 phone.

The Small Outer Display

The 5.4-inch cover display is probably the most debated design choice. From The Verge:

Apple says you’re getting 90 percent of the screen area of an iPhone 18 Pro, but that’s pretty small for today’s apps. It’s like having an iPhone 5 in a world of iPhone Pro Maxes.

Brian compared it to his old iPhone mini, saying that “it feels really small on the cover screen. Too small.” Chance ran into the limits of the outer display in Safari:

But the awkwardness of the iPhone’s 5.4-inch outer display shows up in Safari. The web simply isn’t optimized for this form factor.

It’s easy to find yourself on a Safari webpage where you can’t see anything but a cookie popup or newsletter banner. Granted, you can’t really blame Apple for that. It’s clear the modern web isn’t optimized for such a small, squat form factor.

David Imel, on the other hand, sees the small screen as a feature:

The Duo feels like the most task-oriented iPhone ever. That’s because the outer display is small, so when I’m doing anything substantial, I need to commit to opening it and using the inner display.

Righties, Lefties, and Volume Buttons

With the dock and app controls on the right side of the screen, the Duo is, in Marques’ words, “a very right-handed phone.” Abrar Al-Heeti at CNET had a message for left-handed users:

But my condolences to all the lefties, as you can’t shift controls to the other side of the screen.

The volume buttons, which are now on the top edge, take some getting used to as well. Joanna:

And that means when you’re on a phone call, I almost never hit the right button because I have to tap up here and I can’t feel which is up or which is down.

Brian went as far as saying:

In some cases, in some ways, I actually found the Z Fold 8 more natural to use than the iPhone because they have the dock on the bottom.

The Verge summed it up nicely:

A lot of using the Duo is just figuring out how to use an iPhone again, which hasn’t happened in a long time.

Third-Party Apps Aren’t Ready (Yet)

The biggest problem at launch appears to be third-party apps for the Duo. The Verge explained the three levels of app support, including what they call the “messy middle”:

The second category is what you might call the messy middle: apps that have been updated for iOS 27. They get some automatic layout fixes so they’ll automatically expand to fill the inner screen in landscape orientation and don’t look quite as silly as standard iPhone apps. But you can tell they haven’t actually been designed for these displays, and those rough edges are super obvious.

Joanna was less diplomatic:

So, how do I say this nicely to some of the third party apps I’ve been testing. You’re drunk. They’re sloppy. They’re inconsistent. And they just sometimes refuse to behave.

(She also found a calendar app for ants.) Marques had a similar experience:

But the general experience has been flipping between a whole bunch of not optimized apps that look pretty terrible on the Duo right now.

Things are moving fast, though. According to Max:

The reason I want to bring this up is because over the ~6 days I’ve been using my iPhone Duo, apps went from not at all optimized (except for Perplexity and Claude), to nearly half of them being updated.

And Julian Chokkattu at Wired made a fair point:

But it is a little maddening that some app developers, who for years have never seemed to care about optimizing their app for Android folding phones, are so quick to embrace Apple’s fold.

The Fun Apps

When an app is properly optimized, Julian says, “the experience is chef’s kiss.” Several reviewers also fell for apps built specifically for the Duo’s form factor. Michael said that “Tiny Laptops is quite possibly my favorite iOS app of the past 5 years,” and Raymond is optimistic about what’s coming:

Every day I open X and see imaginative app designs for the iPhone Duo, like a Nintendo DS emulator for playing retro games, and it feels like we could be on the verge of app renaissance for the iPhone platform. That’s exciting in a way that it hasn’t been in more than a decade.

Multitasking and the iPad Question

The Duo is the first iPhone that can run two apps side by side, but the implementation is more limited than on iPad. Chance:

I wish there were more iPadOS elements sprinkled throughout the iPhone Duo’s software. It’s great having Split View, but I wish there was an iPadOS-like way to drag and drop apps into that Split View interface. Slide Over also seems like a piece of low-hanging fruit.

Julian:

If you have two apps split-screen on the Duo, Apple won’t let you resize one app to be slightly bigger than the other like you can on Android. Here, a 50-50 split is always enforced.

Portrait orientation is even more limited, according to The Verge:

If you want to have two apps open when you’re holding the Duo in portrait mode, you’re basically out of luck — unless what you want is to watch a video on the top while scrolling an app on the bottom.

Julian also tried working with a keyboard and trackpad, which only worked after enabling AssistiveTouch:

If the Duo is the iPhone that lets you do more, Apple should natively enable cursor support just like it does on iPads.

Max, interestingly, prefers the constraints:

Something I’ve also found myself enjoying a lot about the iPhone Duo is actually the fact that multi-tasking is a bit more limiting.

Max also confirmed on X that Apple Pencil support is coming with iOS 27.2

Poses, StandBy, and Watching Stuff

As Joanna put it, “Apple’s basically turned the iPhone into a yoga class.” Marques thinks the half-open poses are where the Duo stands out:

But the other thing it’s actually really good at better than a lot of other foldables is the halfway open state because this hinge is so sturdy in the middle that it’s probably the best foldable at just being partially open.

Raymond noted that “the iPhone Duo’s StandBy mode works even when it’s not plugged in,” and Mark found a good use for the laptop pose:

For example, when watching “Man of Steel” for the hundredth time on the Apple TV app, I could put the Duo in tabletop mode like a laptop, and it showed the video up top and the playback controls down below.

For watching and reading, iJustine said that “the Duo as a content viewing machine is just that. It is a machine,” and Tyler Stalman thinks that, for some people, “if you use an iPad a lot, this might be able to replace both.”

Touch ID

The lack of Face ID is the most common complaint across all reviews. Chance wrote:

I think switching from Face ID to Touch ID has been the hardest thing to get used to on iPhone Duo. I’ve become so accustomed to just looking at my iPhone to unlock it. Having to deliberately reach for the side button feels like a step backward, even though Touch ID works quickly and reliably.

Marques:

I really think Face ID is going to be the number one thing people miss coming from other iPhones. Not the zoom cameras, not the thinner and lighter form factors. I think it’s Face ID.

Jaron’s advice:

You’re going to want to register all 10 of your fingers, too, because you never hold this thing the same way twice.

I have found that Touch ID is slower than Face ID for unlocking the phone. It got to the point where I was so grateful that I have an Apple Watch because I could set it to automatically unlock it when it sensed I was wearing the watch. Unlock with Watch is also, somehow, faster than using Touch ID.

Brian came to the same conclusion: “you will want to wear an Apple Watch.” Joanna was more emotional about it: “Face ID. I cannot tell you how deeply I miss you. Please come back.” The Verge, however, got over it quickly:

But a week is long enough to get used to Touch ID life again, and it’s mostly painless once you remember you’re supposed to be using it.

Cameras

The Duo’s dual cameras are a step down from the iPhone 18 Pro, and reviewers are split on how much that matters. Jaron:

The Duo cameras are all middling in quality. That doesn’t mean you can’t get great photos with the iPhone Duo; it just means that there are way better cameras available even in Apple’s own product line.

The Verge:

The Duo relies on heavier sharpening to make up for its weaker hardware, so fine details look a little crunchier than they do on the 18 Pro.

Tyler, who shoots professionally with his iPhone, was more forgiving:

Looking at the image quality of the Pro, it does use a bigger, better sensor. There’s no getting around that. It’s a bit nicer than the Duo, but most people are not going to spot the difference.

Michael put the Duo up against the Galaxy Z Fold 8 and said, “I don’t think it’s a stretch to call this the best camera on a foldable in the US.” Marques described the Duo as “the productivity entertainment iPhone that happens to have good enough cameras,” but he also called the under-display camera on the inner screen “trash” for photos. And David is disappointed by the missing pro features:

There’s also no ProRAW or ProRes, which is disappointing for a $2,000 device.

The good news, as The Verge noted, is that “every camera on this thing is a selfie camera.”

Battery Life

Most reviewers came away impressed with battery life. Michael:

Battery life in particular is just outstanding. I’m talking 10 to 20% left at bedtime after a 17-hour day with hours of gaming or camera sessions, sometimes both.

Julian said, “With average use, I’ve ended most days with around 40 percent left by bedtime,” and David wrote:

I’m always shocked when I still have 90% battery remaining after a few hours off the charger.

Not everyone agrees, though. Jaron called it “just barely good enough,” and The Verge concluded that the Duo “doesn’t seem ready to last a full day of heavy use.”

Heat

Several reviewers noticed the Duo getting warm under load. Jaron:

The Duo can also get warm if you work it. Playing games, editing photos, or doing anything that stressed the processor resulted in pretty noticeable warmth on the right side of the phone when unfolded. It will then gradually spread that heat out across the spine and over to the other side of the phone if you keep using it.

The iPhone 18 Pro is really, really good at heat dissipation to the point that it never really feels hot in a single spot. Rather, the whole phone feels warmer — I intentionally am not using the word hot here. The iPhone Duo still feels hot at a single point when the processor is really chugging.

Joanna:

Apple says the warmth is actually a sign of the new thermal design doing its job, moving heat away from the chip to keep performance up. But to me, it just feels like the phone is really warm.

The Verge saw it affect performance with camera features:

Add in processor-intensive camera features like Smart Take, which automatically hits the shutter button, and the phone gets hot enough to start noticeably lagging after a while.

Chance, on the other hand, said, “I do think the iPhone Duo runs a bit hotter than the iPhone 18 Pro, but not in a way that impacts performance.”

Speakers

And now for the most surprising disagreement of the bunch. Chance wasn’t impressed:

I do think the iPhone Duo’s speakers leave a little bit to be desired. I wasn’t overly impressed with the speaker quality, and I think there’s a notable disparity compared with the iPhone 18 Pro. The iPhone Duo’s speakers sound thinner and quieter to my ears.

Jaron, however, loved them:

Luckily, Apple knocked this one out of the park: they are loud, have surprisingly good low-end rendition, and excellent clarity. Big thumbs up.

Brian called the Duo “the best sounding foldable that I’ve experienced to date,” and Mark’s take was simple: “Surprisingly good!”

Wrapping Up

The Verge’s conclusion captures the general mood well:

It’s incomplete as a product, but complete enough as an idea that you can see where things are going.

Marques thinks some trade-offs are here to stay:

Apple can’t completely engineer their way around the compromises of this form factor, like the slightly worse battery and the slightly worse speakers and the slightly worse cameras. Like, that’s just physics.

Joanna is more hopeful:

The good news is most of my other frustrations can be fixed with software updates and developers figuring out how to make great apps for two very different screen sizes.

I hope to be able to get my hands on an iPhone Duo soon. Once that happens, expect a lot of coverage on MacStories for the next few weeks. Stay tuned.

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Ben Davis (co-host of one of my favorite new podcasts this year, Nerd Snipe) has a fascinating take on a question I’ve seen many in the Apple community ponder as well: if these frontier models are so good, why do most AI apps from the big labs still kind of suck?

Davis wrote about this in relation to the ChatGPT/Codex desktop app, which has turned into a bit of a kitchen-sink design phenomenon with all kinds of features crammed into a UI that has two left sidebars, multiple modalities, and all sorts of disjointed menus.

To me the most interesting thing here is the implied question of “if the Codex team has unlimited tokens on really powerful unreleased models, why is the product getting worse?”

The lazy answer is “it’s just vibe coded slop, real artisanal code wouldn’t be like this”. Anyone who still says this is a moron and you can ignore them.

“Vibe coding” is not the problem. Frankly, these models are better at writing code than pretty much anyone at this point. You tell the model to make something and it’ll make that thing quite well. And also to be clear, Jira was horrid before LLMs existed. Good and bad products have always existed, and I actually think you can make infinitely better products now when using the agents properly (see T3 Code and Grok Bot).

I’ve been reviewing apps for over 17 years. Without a doubt, the most basic “vibe-coded” app created with Opus 5.5 today is infinitely more stable and nicer than any first app from an amateur developer in 2009. So if we agree that these models can write good code now, why is it that so many apps are still bad?

As we argued in our interview with OpenAI’s own Andrew Ambrosino (the irony is not lost on me), it comes down to human discernment, taste, and other qualities that can’t be turned into “metrics” for a model…at least not yet.

Davis continues:

To put a more precise definition on it, I think this “taste” is the ability to make good decisions in places where there isn’t a programmatic verification function.

For example: “make this function really fast” isn’t a “taste” task it’s a hill climbing task (make changes => test changes => repeat until goal met) which the models excel at right now (I think that any problem which can be expressed in this shape can be solved now by Opus 5.5)

“Which of these color palettes do you prefer?” is a “taste” question. You can’t really put a verifier on it other than your own opinion AKA your own taste. It’s a simple little example, but everything from codebase structure to dashboard layout to how features in chatgpt fit together all fit under here. Their implementations are “correct”, the tests pass, I just hate the choices they made.

“The tests pass, I just hate the choices” sums up my experience with coding agents perfectly. We’re working on our first two apps for MacStories (more in the near future), and while I’m not writing the code, I have to spend so much time thinking about usability decisions, onboarding flows, iOS best practices, and “it just doesn’t feel right” issues that models haven’t been able to abstract yet. I have to wonder if, in a rush to maximize infinite token usage and build everything “because why not?”, perhaps the big labs may have ignored these other aspects of good software design. I strongly believe that there’s more to a great app experience than elegant code that passes tests.

Knowing how these things can change so quickly in this scene, I’m sure this post will be obsolete in a few months. Maybe even weeks. But at this moment in time, Davis’ article is spot-on and human decisions still make a dent in software coded by agents.

As part of today’s announcements related to Home (including the brand new HomeView, which we’ve covered here), Apple also announced HomePod mini 2, an update to its popular line of diminutive speakers for the home first launched in 2020. The new HomePod mini comes in new colors, will support Siri AI in select markets with a future software update, has a new ‘Sound Glow’ top panel that intelligently adapts colors shown to match what is playing, and offers more integrations with the Apple TV 4K and Mac – all while delivering improved and richer sound compared to the first-generation model.

First, the look. The HomePod mini 2 looks nearly identical to its predecessor, except for the aforementioned Sound Glow and the new colors: pink, green, blue, white, and midnight. From the photos we’ve seen so far, they look really nice, and I’m personally a fan of the green and pink options.

Sound Glow is the most apparent hardware-related innovation here: the top panel has been re-engineered to become “a visual canvas that glows and pulses in sync with the music”. The panel reacts in real time to bass and treble, adjusting its animation accordingly, but it also borrows from the Music app’s Now Playing screen: the colors displayed on Sound Glow will be subtly color-matched to the artwork of the audio that’s playing now. According to Apple, Sound Glow will also play custom animations when a soundscape like ‘Rain’ is activated, although a footnote on Apple’s website suggests that the feature will require an iPhone with Apple Intelligence enabled.

The real-time music analysis capabilities of the HomePod mini are made possible by the upgraded chip inside the device, the S10 previously seen on the Apple Watch. (The original HomePod mini had an S5.) In addition to dynamically adapting to sound in real time, the S10 is behind the HomePod mini 2’s ability to run Siri AI (more on this below) as well as to become part of a four-speaker surround group when combined with the also-new fourth-generation Apple TV 4K.

When four speakers are grouped, they can coordinate with an Apple TV to recognize each other’s position in a room and calibrate audio levels and timings to match what is playing. As someone who used for several years a two-HomePod mini pair with an Apple TV in my old apartment, I’m very intrigued by the potential of four little units carefully placed in my larger living room. As detailed by Apple, surround sound requires four HomePod mini 2 or HomePod (2nd generation) speakers in matching pairs front and center, so you can’t mix and match HomePod and HomePod mini 2 at the back of your couch, for instance.

In addition to Apple TV, the HomePod mini 2 can also act as a default speaker for the Mac now. This potentially creates even more purchasing problems for me because, while I have a Sonos Move speaker at my desk, I dislike that I cannot set it as a default sound destination for my Mac mini, so I may even have to consider new speakers for my desk now. Ouch.

In its announcement today, Apple touts the work that has gone into computational audio powered by the S10 and aspects such as “Apple-designed force‑cancelling passive radiators” to improve the HomePod mini’s bass extension; those are things that we can only evaluate with an actual hands-on (ears-on?) with the product. What we can judge today is the Siri AI announcement: HomePod mini 2 will support Siri AI with a future software update, which means the assistant will be able to draw from the user’s context from a paired Apple device (Apple mentions “device”, not “iPhone”, meaning that iPad and Mac should work, too?) and offer personalized suggestions. You can read more about Siri AI in my review from last month here. In an interesting detail, however, Apple notes that even if you have Apple Intelligence disabled on a paired device, you’ll still get access to Siri AI’s newfound world knowledge features when Siri AI becomes available on HomePod mini 2:

Once Siri AI is enabled on a supported HomePod mini speaker, even users without an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone or iPad will benefit from Siri AI’s broad world knowledge; its ability to have rich, natural conversations; and its improved music discovery.

Notice how the quote above mentions “iPhone or iPad”, which makes the role of the Mac a little unclear.

That’s about it for the HomePod mini 2. It costs $149, which seems fair given the product’s features, and is available for pre-order today in the U.S. and 23 other countries. It launches on October 30, presumably without Siri AI given Apple’s “future software update” wording. It’s available in Italy, and I’m leaning toward pre-ordering two of them.

In my iOS and iPadOS 27 review, I wrote about one of the more interesting additions to the Shortcuts app for power users: automation triggers based on the contents of push notifications received on your device. As I explained, with this new trigger, you can create automations that run certain actions whenever a notification from a specific app, ideally containing a specific title or body text, arrives on your iPhone and iPad.

Deflector, a free utility by indie developer Cizzuk Shihu, leverages this feature in a fun and novel way: it lets you run any shortcut from your Shortcuts library directly – without launching the Shortcuts app first – from either the Dynamic Island or a Live Activity on the Lock Screen.

The concept isn’t new: we’ve seen shortcut launchers embedded in Live Activities before. What’s different is that while previous solutions relied on the Shortcuts URL scheme to open the Shortcuts app and then run a shortcut, Deflector’s approach is entirely self-contained in a Live Activity and doesn’t force you to lose the context of what you’re doing. Tap a shortcut, and it runs immediately – just like the Shortcuts widget works on the Home Screen.

The question is: how?

The ingenious implementation behind Deflector is the aforementioned automation support for notifications. When you install Deflector, you’re asked to also install a companion shortcut aptly called ‘Deflector Automation’. This shortcut, thanks to changes in iOS and iPadOS 27, contains a shareable automation that you need to enable, which is another major change of the Shortcuts app I covered here. Open the automation, and you’ll notice that it contains a notification trigger that parses the contents of a notification, allowing Shortcuts to run a shortcut directly via the native ‘Run Shortcut’ action.

And here lies the magic trick behind Deflector: whenever you tap a shortcut in its Live Activity, the app sends a notification to itself that contains the name of the shortcut you want to run in the body text of the notification. When the “self notification” arrives – and these are silent notifications that you won’t even see on-screen – the associated Shortcuts automation is triggered, the name of the shortcut is passed to the ‘Run Shortcut’ action, and voila – the shortcut runs, no x-callback-URL necessary.

That’s all there is to Deflector, effectively. You can choose how many shortcuts you want to display in the Live Activity, and you can also choose an SF Symbol and color for each one. The process of fetching shortcuts from your library is handled by the same automation, which uses an App Intent and the ‘Get My Shortcuts’ action to pass the full list of your shortcuts back to Deflector in a couple of seconds. This is another novel implementation I’ve never seen anywhere else.

There are some optimizations I’d like to see in Deflector. There is, for instance, a one-second delay between tapping a shortcut and seeing the shortcut execute on-screen, which is most likely the time it takes for the notification to be sent, delivered, and parsed by Shortcuts behind the scenes. I also wish I could rename launchers in the Dynamic Island to use custom names: if you rename a launcher, it’ll break the ability for Deflector to find a matching shortcut in your library.

These are minor complaints about a free utility based on a genius workaround that has allowed me to launch shortcuts more quickly than before and, most importantly, tie two different sets of shortcuts to the Action button and the Dynamic Island. One of the reasons I still love writing about indie apps after all these years is exemplified by Deflector: in the right hands, new Apple APIs and frameworks can be applied by indie developers to ideas that Apple didn’t foresee in the first place.

Deflector is free on the App Store. If you’re a Shortcuts user, you’ll want to play with this app right away.

The process for this year’s iOS and iPadOS review was, on the surface, similar to last year’s: I researched, wrote, and edited the entire story in Notion, then used a custom tool to export it to Markdown for MacStories. Structurally, it was also a mirror of last year’s setup: I had separate databases for notes...

The Frames CLI – the companion command line interface to my Apple Frames shortcut I released earlier this year – received a 1.5.0 update earlier today with two notable additions: iPhone 18 Pro frames, and experimental support for iPhone Duo screenshots in all poses.

As always, my shortcut and CLI are based on Apple’s official product bezels, which is why, as of today, there is no support for Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 yet (those frames haven’t been published by Apple). iPhone 18 Pro is the new default frame family for the two Pro and Pro Max screen sizes, and the CLI supports all the new device colors this year (Burgundy, Glacier, Silver, and Black).

iPhone Duo support is experimental. I obviously don’t have an iPhone Duo yet, but thanks to Opus 5.5, I was able to grab screenshots from the Xcode 27.1 Device Hub, verify them against Apple’s official assets, and test everything in the Frames CLI. It should work! The CLI – and, thanks to its skill, your agent of choice – supports framing screenshots taken on the inner and outer display, different poses, different rotation settings, as well as screen recordings.

If you’re a developer working on iPhone Duo apps, I think the updated Frames CLI should come in handy to automate the process of framing multiple screenshots and screen recordings. As before, you can take advantage of CLI features such as proportional scaling, merge mode, and batch mode, which should help you with your upcoming App Store submissions for the iPhone Duo.

The Frames CLI is free and open source, works with any agent, and is highly customizable. I’ll release an updated version of the Apple Frames shortcut once I can get my hands on an actual iPhone Duo next month (hopefully). Fingers crossed.